Building A Forum

[SEODinosaur]

I want to build a forum, and I was wondering, can anyone please help me find an open source platform for building it? I want it to be custom and I want to create my own rules. Also I want this forum to be about all topics, is that going to be an issue?

[Highland]

I'd go with phpBB. It's Open Source and has several popular mods, including some for SEO.

Some paid software is also SEO friendly, including software like vBulletin and xenForo.

[icecarats]

If you're going custom then I agree with Highland, phpBB is pretty okay; it's not as knock your socks off as some of the paid solutions, but what's nice is there's lots of example code out there. Forum software is generally so abstracted that it doesn't matter if there are lots of topics or not, since you can create sub-boards for each major topic. This wikipedia link has a good write up of feature-sets, and then near the bottom are links to comparison articles for PHP and ASP based forums:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_Internet_forum_software

[NakulGoyal]

You might also want to look at http://www.mybb.com/

Pretty easy to get it up and running. Eventually, you could consider upgrading to VBulletin.

[KeriMorgret]

Can you elaborate a little on the forum being about "all topics"? That sounds a bit broad, and possibly an uphill battle if you're trying to be all things to all people. Would this be a place where one could talk about Christmas wreath designs and song lyrics and video game strategies and knitting?

[SEODinosaur]

Yeah, thats the Idea a forum of all forums : )